An archive of articles and listserve postings of interest, mostly posted without commentary, linked to commentary at the Education Notes Online blog. Note that I do not endorse the points of views of all articles, but post them for reference purposes.

Monday, April 30, 2012

Winerip writes: Indeed,
a recently released study by the city’s Independent Budget Office
concluded that by focusing on student progress, the department had
improved the grading system’s reliability.

What system? There was no school grading system before the progress reports. Does that mean the SINI or SURR list?

And what about this?

Though
the progress reports are assumed to control for demographics like
poverty and race, an analysis by The New York Times indicates that
schools with the most middle-class students get the best grades. Schools
with wealthier students are three times more likely to get an A than
schools serving the poor, which are 14 times more likely to get a D or
F. Mr. Polakow-Suransky said this partly reflected the achievement gap.

But
he also said that if department officials had wanted to create a
grading system that completely controlled for poverty and race, they
could.

“It’s
a very intentional choice not to,” he said. “We could zero it out. But
that would undermine our goals. We don’t want the achievement gap to be
invisible. We want to see if we’re making progress and creating change.”

EXCLUSIVE
A
for-profit education firm is soaking taxpayers by subleasing buildings
to the Brooklyn public charter schools it runs at astronomical rates —
including one at an incredible 1,000 percent markup, sources said.
While
the city Department of Education leases buildings in Brooklyn for
between $5 and $25 per square foot, the Michigan-based National Heritage
Academies subleases to the charter schools it operates for roughly $38
to $45 per square foot, according to a review of public school leases by
The Post.
For example, NHA is leasing a former
school building on Parkville Avenue in Kensington from the Brooklyn
Diocese for approximately $264,000 per year, according to a church
source.

Gregory P. Mango

Yet
the firm billed the site, the Brooklyn Dreams Charter School, $2.76
million for rent and related charges there last year — a 1,000 percent
markup, financial filings show.
Critics say it’s
part of the company’s MO: putting considerable money down to purchase or
renovate properties, charging sky-high rents to recoup its investment —
and eventually turning a hefty profit.
“The school
is great, but I can’t see why they pay such a high rate — it’s
ridiculous,’’ griped Les Fontain, the father of two boys, in
kindergarten and first grade, at Brooklyn Dreams.
But
Cynthia Proctor, a spokeswoman for the State University of New York
Charter Schools Institute — which approved charters for the NHA-managed
schools in Bushwick and Kensington — countered that the need to use
educational funds for such rent highlights the incredible challenge
charter schools face in securing space in New York.
Most
public charter schools get no funding for facilities, and mortgage
lenders are wary of dealing with them because their charters are up for
renewal every five years, supporters say.
“The
bottom line is that if it wasn’t for NHA’s upfront investment in the
real estate, the [Bushwick] school would probably not exist in private
space,” Proctor said.
Financial records show that
NHA has been charging more than $3 million per year in “occupancy” fees
to that school — the academically successful Brooklyn Excelsior Charter
School in Bushwick — for a building that the company bought in 2004 for
$3.3 million.
Last year’s rental fees represented nearly 30 percent of the school’s $10.8 million in taxpayer funding.
But
NHA officials said they’ve plunked down wads of cash to renovate the
buildings, including more than $21 million for the Kensington school and
$13.1 million at the Bushwick site.
The company
also subsidizes the schools in their infancy — when state funding can’t
cover both educational services and rent — including nearly $6 million
over the past two years.
“Rents are negotiated by
NHA and the school boards that choose NHA as its management partner,”
said company spokesman Joe DiBenedetto. “NHA assumes all financial
risks, makes needed investments to improve academic results, and
typically waits up to 10 years to recoup its initial investment in a
school it operates.”
The firm is one of the few
for-profits in New York that manages all educational aspects of its
charter schools, after being grandfathered in when state law abolished
the practice in 2010.Additional reporting by Ikimulisa Livingstonygonen@nypost.com

A Very Pricey Pineapple

Actually (spoiler alert!) I’m going to use the pineapple as a sneaky way
to introduce the topic of privatization of public education. I was
driven to this. Do you know how difficult it is to get anybody to read
about “privatization of education?” It’s hell. A pineapple, on the other
hand, is something everybody likes. It’s a symbol of hospitality. Its
juice is said to remove warts. And you really cannot beat the
talking-fruit angle.

This month, New York eighth graders took a standardized English test
that included a story called “The Hare and the Pineapple,” in which
you-know-what challenges a hare to a race. The forest animals suspect
that since the pineapple can’t move, it must have some clever scheme to
ensure victory, and they decide to root against the bunny. But when the
race begins, the pineapple just sits there. The hare wins. Then the
animals eat the pineapple. The end.

There were many complaints from the eighth graders, who had to answer
questions like: “What would have happened if the animals had decided to
cheer for the hare?” They were also supposed to decide whether the
animals ate the pineapple because they were hungry, excited, annoyed or
amused. (That part bothered me a lot. We’ve got a talking pineapple here, people. You don’t just go and devour it for having delusions of grandeur.)

Teachers, parents and education experts all chimed in. Nobody liked the
talking pineapple questions. The Daily News, which broke the story,
corralled “Jeopardy!” champion Ken Jennings, who concluded that “the
plot details are so oddly chosen that the story seems to have been
written during a peyote trip.”

The state education commissioner, John King, announced that the
questions would not count in the official test scores. There was no
comment from the test author. That would be Pearson, the world’s largest
for-profit education business, which has a $32 million five-year
contract to produce New York standardized tests.

Now — finally — we have tumbled into my central point. We have turned
school testing into a huge corporate profit center, led by Pearson, for
whom $32 million is actually pretty small potatoes. Pearson has a
five-year testing contract with Texas that’s costing the state taxpayers
nearly half-a-billion dollars.

This is the part of education reform nobody told you about. You heard
about accountability, and choice, and innovation. But when No Child Left Behind
was passed 11 years ago, do you recall anybody mentioning that it would
provide monster profits for the private business sector?

Me neither.

It’s not just the tests. No Child Left Behind has created a system of public-funded charter schools,
a growing number of which are run by for-profit companies. Some of them
are completely online, with kids getting their lessons at home via
computer. The academic results can be abysmal, but on the plus side —
definitely no classroom crowding issues.

Pearson is just one part of the picture, albeit a part about the size of
Mount Rushmore. Its lobbyists include the guy who served as the top
White House liaison with Congress on drafting the No Child law. It has
its own nonprofit foundation that sends state education commissioners on
free trips overseas to contemplate school reform.

An American child could go to a public school run by Pearson, studying
from books produced by Pearson, while his or her progress is evaluated
by Pearson standardized tests. The only public participant in the show
would be the taxpayer.

If all else fails, the kid could always drop out and try to get a
diploma via the good old G.E.D. The General Educational Development test
program used to be operated by the nonprofit American Council on
Education, but last year the Council and Pearson announced that they
were going into a partnership to redevelop the G.E.D. — a nationally
used near-monopoly — as a profit-making enterprise.

“We’re a capitalist system, but this is worrisome,” said New York Education Commissioner King.

The Obama administration has been trying to tackle the astronomical
costs of 50 different sets of standardized tests by funding efforts by
states to develop shared models — a process you will be stunned to hear
is being denounced by conservatives like Gov. Rick Perry of Texas as “a
federal takeover of public schools.”

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has also begun giving out waivers from
the requirement that children in failing public schools be given
after-school tutoring. Idea sounded great. Hardly helped the kids at
all. But no for-profit tutoring company was left behind.

The pushback against privatization isn’t easy. We’re now in a world in
which decisions about public education involve not just parents and
children and teachers, but also big profits or losses for the private
sector. Change the tests, or the textbooks, or the charters, or even the rules for teacher certification, and you change somebody’s bottom line.

Randi Weingarten, a lawyer, was placed in a school to get her creds as a teacher when it was decided she would become president of the UFT and taught high school full-time for only 6 months and part time for 6 years.

Fixing the Fixation on Testing

Posted: 02/21/2012 9:27 am

President Obama got high marks from teachers and parents when he said in his recent State of the Union address that schools should stop teaching to the test and instead give teachers latitude to teach with creativity and passion.
I immediately recalled times as a teacher when I thought my students learned the most. It wasn't when we were intensely preparing for the Regents exams or any other standardized tests. My students were most engaged during project-based learning, when they worked in teams and wrestled with complex topics, such as the decision to drop the atomic bomb during World War II. My proudest moment as an educator was watching my students compete in the We the People civics competition and observing--after all their preparation--the confidence with which our teams debated constitutional issues.
Those are the kinds of educational experiences that excite students and teachers alike. Teachers don't want to spend valuable time endlessly preparing for "the test." They want to guide their students to ask insightful questions, offer well-reasoned opinions, and work diligently until they master content. Those are the types of classroom experiences that unleash students' ingenuity and reveal their understanding of the material.
And that's the kind of learning that is being stamped out by the current pervasive fixation on testing. Test-based accountability is out of balance, and parents, teachers and public officials--from President Obama to California Gov. Jerry Brown to Texas Commissioner of Education Robert Scott--are speaking out about it.
Obama was right when he spoke last year about using standardized tests appropriately--to diagnose students' strengths and weaknesses, not to punish students or schools. Yet, numerous policies enacted by the U.S. Department of Education since No Child Left Behind have skewed the emphasis toward testing and sanctions.
Look at the difference between private and public schools in our country. Most private schools do not administer high-stakes tests, and that is reflected in their curriculum and culture. Freedom from test fixation allows them to provide enriching experiences and in-depth instruction in an array of subjects.
Public schools, in contrast, are required by federal and state laws to administer what numerous experts consider to be too many low-quality standardized assessments, which have significant consequences. This, in turn, drives an excessive focus on the tests, test preparation and tested subjects.
Indeed, evidence supports teachers' and parents' concerns. An examination of National Assessment of Educational Progress results by Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute shows that disadvantaged students have made significant progress in the last generation, but that such progress has stalled in the decade since NCLB and its unprecedented test-based accountability measures were enacted.
Proper accountability is extremely important. But current public school accountability mechanisms don't gauge good teaching or deep acquisition of knowledge. The Common Core State Standards, and the assessments being developed as part of their implementation, can help bridge that divide by focusing on deeper understanding of core content that students then can apply broadly.
Nations that outperform the United States have gotten this balance right--emphasizing teaching and learning versus testing and blaming. In Singapore, for example, where I spent time with teachers and students last week, schools are focused intently on growth and achievement. However, as I observed numerous diverse groups of children deeply engaged in learning, nothing I saw could be construed as teaching to the test.
Test mania won't get our children or our country where we need to go. Obama made a good case for this when he recently honored science fair winners from across the country at the White House. The president was clearly impressed by the innovative projects--he even shot a marshmallow from a small but powerful air cannon. The ingenuity on display at the White House should be cultivated in every public school in America.
We hope that the views expressed from the bully pulpit of the presidency will be matched with state and federal action that moves away from the excessive fixation on testing and toward the appropriate use of assessments to support teaching and learning. That's what parents of advantaged kids seek when enrolling them in private schools, and that's what the highest-achieving countries do. And it's what we can and should do in every American public school.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

The Vietnam War produced more than its share of iconic idiocies.
Perhaps the most revelatory was the psychotic assertion of an army major
explaining the U.S. bombing of the provincial hamlet of Ben Tre: “We
had to destroy the village in order to save it.” If only such
self-extinguishing claims for intelligence were confined to military
war.

The U.S is ratcheting up a societal-level war on public education. At
issue is whether we are going to make it better — build it into
something estimable, a social asset that undergirds a noble and
prosperous society — or whether we’re going to tear it down so that
private investors can get their hands on the almost $1 trillion we spend
on it every year. The tear-it-down option is the civilian equivalent of
Ben Tre, but on a vastly larger scale and with incomparably greater
stakes: we must destroy public education in order to save it. It’s still
early in the game, but right now the momentum is with the wreckers
because that’s where the money is. Whether they succeed or not will be
up to you.

Here’s a three-step recipe for how to destroy education. It maps
perfectly to how to make a prodigious profit by privatizing it. It is
the essential game plan of the big money boys.
First, lower the costs so you can jack up the profits. Since the
overwhelming cost in education is the salaries of the teachers, this
means firing the experienced teachers, for they are the most expensive.
Replace them with “teachers” who are young, inexperienced, and
inexpensive. Better yet, waive requirements that they have to have any
training, that is to say, that they be credentialed. That way, you can
get the absolute cheapest workers available. Roll them over frequently
so they don’t develop any expectation that they’ll ever make a career
out of it.

Second, make the curriculum as narrow, rote, and regimented as you
can. This makes it possible for low-skilled “teachers” to “teach.” All
they need do is maintain order while drilling students in mindless
memorization and robotic repetition. By all means avoid messy things
like context, nuance, values, complexity, reflection, depth,
ambiguity—all the things that actually make for true intelligence. It’s
too hard to teach those things and, besides, you need intelligent,
experienced people to be able to do it. Stick with the model: Profitable
equals simplistic and formulaic. Go with it.

Finally, rinse and repeat five thousand times. Proliferate
franchised, chartered McSchools with each classroom in each McSchool
teaching the same thing on the same day in exactly the same way. So, for
the math lesson on the formula of a line, you only need develop it
once. But you download it in Power Point on the assigned day so the room
monitors, i.e., the “teachers,” know what bullets to read. Now repeat
this for every lesson in every course in every school, every day. In
biology, chemistry, geometry, history, English, Spanish, indeed, all of a
K-12 curriculum. Develop the lesson literally once, but distribute and
reuse it thousands of times with low-cost proctors doing the
supervision. The cost is infinitesimal making the profit potential
astronomical.

This is the essential charter school model and the money is all the
rationale its promoters need. Think about it. There’s a trillion dollars
a year spent on public education in the U.S. and enterprising investors
want to get their meat hooks on it. Where else in the world can you
find a $1 trillion opportunity that is essentially untouched? Not in
automobiles. Not in health care. Not in weapons, computers, banking,
telecommunications, agriculture, entertainment, retail, manufacturing,
housing. Nowhere.

Oh, to be sure, you have to soften up the public with a decades-long
PR campaign bashing teachers, vilifying their unions, trashing schools,
and condemning public education in general, all the while promising the
sun, moon, and stars for privatization, which is the ultimate charter
goal. Voila! You’ve got your chance.

But to really make a killing, you need not just revenues, but
profits. That’s why the low cost delivery and “build it once but resell
it millions of times” model is so key. It was that very model that made
Bill Gates the richest man in the world. It is what earned Microsoft 13
TIMES the rate of profit of the average Fortune 500 company in the 1990s
and persuaded the Justice Department to declare it a “felony
monopolist”. Gates recognizes the model very well, which is why his
foundation is pouring tens of millions of dollars into charters. And you
thought it was his altruism.

Of course, anybody who actually knows education, indeed, anybody who
is simply intelligent, knows that intelligence does not come from rote
repetition or parroting Power Point slides at the regimented direction
of a room monitor, no matter how perky or well intended. It comes from
an agonizingly complex, intricate, sustained set of challenges to the
mind that are exquisitely choreographed over the better part of two
decades, all intimately tailored to the specific needs of an individual,
inquisitive, aspiring student.

That is what real teachers do. And it is precisely what a
cookie-cutter, low-content, low-cost, high-turnover, high-profit money
mill cannot do. Because it’s not intended to do that. It’s intended to
produce profits. Real education, real intelligence, real character are
agonizingly slow, dazzlingly complex, maddeningly difficult things to
create. You can’t make a profit off of it, unless you destroy it in the
process. That is why not one of the nations of the world that surpass
the U.S. in education performance operate charter-based or privatized
educational systems.

If America wants better education, it needs to fix the greatest force
undermining education, which is poverty. The single most powerful
predictor of student performance is the average income of the zip code
in which they live. But one out of four American students now live in
poverty, and the numbers are growing. One out of two will live in
poverty sometime during their lives. Forty-seven million Americans are
on food stamps. Is it any wonder American school performance is
faltering?

But poverty is a hard and expensive problem to fix. We prefer easy,
painless fixes, or even better, vapid clichés about the “magic of the
market” and such. Why, look what we got from the deregulation of the
banking system: the greatest economic collapse of the last 80 years and
the greatest plunder of the public treasury in the history of the world.

This is the essential neo-liberal agenda which Obama enthusiastically
supports: privatize and deregulate everything, especially public
services, so that the money spent on them can be transferred to private
hands. This is how Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, earned
his bureaucratic bonafides: he converted more than 100 of Chicago’s
public schools to charters while the city’s school superintendent. It’s
unbelievable how credulous we are but obviously, propaganda works.
That’s why the likes of the Gates Foundation keep pouring money into the
cause.

The problem with charter schools is that they simply don’t work, at
least not for delivering high quality education. Of course, given their
formula, how could they? The most thorough research on charter schools,
by Stanford University, shows that while charters do better than public
schools in 17% of cases, they actually do worse in 37%, a more than
2-to-1 bad-to-good ratio!

If your doctor injured two patients for every one he cured, would you
go to him? If your mechanic wrecked two cars for every one he fixed,
would you go to him? Yet that is literally the proposition that charter
school operators are peddling. And that 2-to-1 failure rate is after
charters have skimmed off the better students and run what can only be
called ethnically cleansed schools, counseling out poor performers,
special needs cases, and “undesirable” minorities, leaving them for the
public schools to deal with. For the data show they do that as well.

The irony of all this, indeed, the hypocrisy, is that America is at
least nominally a capitalist county. You would think it would be ok to
be honest about your intentions to make money by pillaging children’s
futures while looting the public purse. God knows the weapons makers,
the banks, the oil companies, the pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness
and others aren’t bashful about it. But that doesn’t seem to be true
here, in education.

Here, it’s all about “the children,” about “streamlining” education,
boosting scores, uplifting minorities, making America competitive, and
just about every other infantile fairy tale they can invoke to convince
the country to hand over the loot. For that’s what it’s really about.
The trillion dollars a year to be made by turning “the children” into
intellectually impotent dullards but profit producing zombies? Well,
that’s just a lavishly fortunate coincidence. Right?

Remember, you can’t save something by destroying it. Which isn’t to
say that swashbuckling entrepreneurs aren’t willing to try. All they
need is the liberating impetus of that essential American ethic: “I’m
getting mine, screw you.” But the cost of this plunder will be
incalculable, for it will ripple through the economy for decades. And
the damage will be irreversible for, while public education is the most
powerful democratizing institution in the world, it only works when the
schools work. When they cease to work, it’s over.
So watch out. A destroyed educational system, a desiccated economy,
and a debauched democracy are coming soon to a school district near you.

Robert Freeman teaches history and economics at a public high
school in northern California. He is the founder of One Dollar For Life,
a national non-profit that helps American schools build schools in the
developing world with donations of one dollar. He can be reached at robertfreeman10@yahoo.com.

Oh, remember the good ole days when politicians just directed that public contracts go to friends, donors and certain companies.

That was then and this is now…and a whole new approach is taking shape.
This week we learned that Governor Malloy and his education
commissioner, Stefan Pryor hired certain consultants to help develop
Malloy’s “Education Reform” bill. Rather than go through some silly
competitive bidding process, they simply got a quasi-state agency, SERC
to hire the two consultants; one for $195,000 and the other for $60,000.
The State Department of Education then reimburses SERC with funds from its budget and it’s all legal (maybe, sort of).
But that is nothing compared to what is quietly taking place in Bridgeport.
Bridgeport is taking it to a whole new level – an approach that saves
time and energy by creating a system in which hundreds of millions in
school funding can be moved “off- line.”
When Mayor Bill Finch and Fairfield County businessmen got tired of
having to deal with elected members of the Bridgeport Board of Education
last year, they convinced Governor Malloy to have the state take over
the Bridgeport school system.
Alas, the state moved so quickly that it broke the law and the State
Supreme Court was forced to step in to stop the takeover attempt and
require that a new election be held to fill the vacancies on the
Bridgeport Board of Education.
Meanwhile, not to be outdone, the Mayor and business community moved
forward with its overall plans. The superintendent of schools was fired
and Paul Vallas, Jr., the famous and renowned “school reformer” was
brought in to completely revamp Bridgeport’s system of public education.
Since the endeavor would cost money that the city of Bridgeport didn’t have, business leaders set up the Bridgeport Education Reform Fund
and quickly raised about $400,000. Vallas’ $229,000 salary is being
paid out of the Fund as are the various consultants Vallas says he needs
to complete his task. To date there has been no information about just
who those consultants are or how much they are being paid.
In fact, since the Fund’s activities are confidential, there is no
way to actually determine how much money has been raised, who donated
the money or even how it is being spent. The Connecticut Post, the Wall
Street Journal and others have written that one of the lead “investors”
in the effort is the ZOOM Foundation and the Lone Pine Foundation, both
of which “belong” to hedge fund billionaire Steve Mandel.
For more on this issue, see the March 26, 2011 Wait What
post for details about the role Meghan Lowney, Zoom’s Executive
Director, played when it came to lobbying state officials to take over
the Bridgeport schools. Although Lowney and others failed to register,
as required under state law, the Ethics Commission can neither confirm
nor deny that an investigation is under way.
But we are now learning that the Bridgeport Education Reform Fund was
only the stalking horse for a much bigger and more impressive effort.
As Bridgeport Superintendent of Schools Vallas rolled out his plans
for a revamped Bridgeport education system, he included the creation of a
“Good Schools Bridgeport Foundation” which will
“support the school district by securing public and private funding
that…and to use that funding to help the district expand high quality
school options.”
Under Vallas’ plan (which was immediately endorsed by Bridgeport’s
Mayor), the “Principal Functions and Responsibilities of the Foundation”
would be:

To monitor academic, financial and operational performance of Bridgeport schools.

To identify high quality Bridgeport schools for future duplication and franchising.

To implement programs to improve existing schools and to expand
school choice options by supporting open enrollment, accelerated and
exemplary programs in qualified schools.

To create a system for identifying, recruiting, incubating and
certifying proven high quality providers to open new schools or to
assume management of failing schools.

To create a process by which the community can provide input into
the selection of school providers to open new schools or to take over
failing schools.

To serve as a pipeline for recruiting and training high quality
administrators, principals and teachers for Bridgeport Public Schools.

And, of course, the Foundation would hold the purse strings to ensure that its vision of appropriate developments take place.
To further insulate the Foundation for meddling by elected school
boards or, for that matter, democracy, his plan also provides that the
Bridgeport Regional Business Council will “monitor the school district
finances” and a new entity that will be called the Bridgeport Academic
Accountability Council and consist of “nationally renowned researchers”
will be put in place to evaluate and guide the school district’s
performance and programs.
In this way, Bridgeport’s parents, teachers and taxpayers would not
need to worry themselves about how school funds are being spent.
The Mayor has announced that he hopes to raise at least $50 million
in private funds for the program or, in his words, “I’m going to raise
millions of dollars…A lot of wealthy people in Fairfield County, they
drive by Bridgeport all the time, and I know they can help, and we
welcome their support.”
And Paul Timpanelli, the President of the Bridgeport Regional
Business Council, the organization responsible for monitoring the
Bridgeport School’s finances called the plan terrific saying “It’s
comprehensive, aggressive. I’ve seen a lot of the details and I’m very
pleased…I don’t know what’s not to like.”
And should anyone doubt their intentions, the Wall Street Journal
wrote last week that “Mr. Vallas argues that if he can show early
successes, the push for better schools from parents, the mayor and the
governor will sustain the momentum no matter who is on the new school
board. But he isn’t counting on that. Under his deal with the current
school board, he is to help pick his successor. And, according to both
Mr. Vallas and the mayor, new money for schools—not only private funds
but, in a twist, also new city tax money—will be funneled through a
non-profit, Good Schools Bridgeport, to try to keep the new school board
from deviating from the Vallas path.”
Although it would certainly engender law suits, there is even talk of
moving the money the city of Bridgeport receives from the State (i.e.
the ECS Funds) into this new Foundation, thereby, bypassing the need to
follow all those pesky “transparency” rules like having to use
competitive bidding or limiting the use of consultants.
Of course, Wait, What? readers will recognize that Governor Malloy’s
“Education Reform” plan already includes a generous program to moves
money “off-line.”
Under Malloy’s proposed “Commissioner’s Network” system, the
commissioner of education will take over 25 failing schools, fire the
staff, ban collective bargaining, turn the schools over to a third party
and that entity will then be legally exempt from the state’s laws
requiring competitive bidding and the law limiting the use of outside
consultants.
Taxpayer funds going to private entities to spend as the deem appropriate.
On the other hand, if they can pull off what they are attempting to
do in Bridgeport, governors and others won’t have to go through that
awkward process of having to order quasi-state agencies to retain
certain consultants or the “lengthy process” of getting the legislature
to change the laws. Under Bridgeport’s new approach the money – public
and private – would go to a private foundation. Then, since the
consultants would already have control of the funds, they could decide
among themselves how they wanted to divvy up the taxpayer’s money.
Between Malloy’s “Education Reform” plan and Bridgeport’s new effort,
the notion of “transparency” is on the way of becoming a word of the
past.
And lest Connecticut resident’s think these efforts are confined to
Bridgeport, rest assured that if Malloy, Pryor, Vallas and the Michelle
Rhee’s of the world can get away with these activities in Bridgeport;
New Britain, Hartford and New London, other fiscally and academically
distressed school districts won’t be far behind. There is a reason the
corporate elite and outside groups are spending so much money to get
Malloy’s bill passed and Bridgeport’s new Foundation set up. When all
is said and done, we aren’t talking about tens of millions of public
dollars; we are literally looking at hundreds of millions of taxpayer
dollars at risk.

Monday, April 23, 2012

How Testing Is Hurting Teaching

The
New York State tests, going on now in middle and elementary schools,
have always been high stakes for students, particularly in fourth and
seventh grades, when their scores determine whether they end up in the
very awful school they are zoned for or the very attractive magnet
school that draws from a larger and more competitive pool. But the
stakes have recently become equally high for teachers, whose ability to
teach is being determined by their ability to improve students’ test
scores.

Many
people think it’s about time. Teachers need to be held accountable for
the work they are being paid to do, and many, many teachers need to get
better at teaching.

We
all know the old needlepoint saying, ‘children learn what they live.’
Well, it turns out that adults learn what they live, too. And now that
teachers are living in a system that evaluates their performance based
on the test scores of their students, they are learning that all that
matters are test scores.

I
see this every day in my work as a staff developer. It’s my job to make
sure that teachers continue to learn and grow so that their students
can learn and grow.

This year, I have seen more and more teaching that is about answers. No inquiry, curiosity or study. No thinking. Just answers.

In
a third grade class, for example, the teacher goes over a practice
test. Students compare their answers and tally their scores.

Some
of them high-five each other; others erase and put the correct answer
on their papers. No one, least of all the teacher, is interested in how
or why those answers are the right ones.

In
a fifth grade class, the teacher is attempting to get his students to
understand a non-fiction article. He asks students what the main idea of
the piece is, a common test question.

When
no one gives the answer he’s looking for, he coaxes, “It begins with a
T.” Students started calling out words that begin with T, most of which
have nothing to do with the passage.

The
teacher finally gives the answer, students copy it on their paper and
move on to the next question. Again, no explanations given; no thinking
taught.

In
the past when I have worked with teachers in scenarios such as these, I
would demonstrate lessons where students would be challenged to uncover
and construct answers rather than copy or guess; I would help plan
units with skills embedded in authentic reading and writing rather than
test prep workbooks that cover a skill a day; I would assist in
designing curriculum around questions requiring study and inquiry rather
than prompts that teach rephrasing and repeating.

This
year, many of my attempts have been met with replies along the lines
of, “Oh, I’d love to do that, but this is the only way my students will
be able to pass the test.”

This
bodes very poorly for our students. The tests have gained an outsized
influence on what happens in classrooms. They are not measuring student
learning, as any good test should, but rather determining it. And in so
doing they have shut down the most important quality of a good teacher —
the ability to learn.

This
is because teaching doesn’t consist of passively transferring knowledge
from one receptacle to another — from the teacher’s brain or the
textbook to the student’s brain — but rather actively facilitating a
process that allows students to construct knowledge. And to do that,
teachers have to simultaneously know and learn.

They
have to know the content of what they’re teaching — the causes of the
Great Depression; how to solve for x; how a writer organizes an idea for
a reader — but they also have to know how to help students access that
material.

This
is constant work requiring constant learning: What is Troy’s brain
doing as his eyes scan a page of text or look at a column of numbers?
What sparks Judith’s curiosity? What makes Maria shut down? How does
Alex respond to feedback? What part of this concept does Jamie get? Why
is William suddenly missing so much school?

Teachers
also have to teach students how to learn; they need to be the model
learner in the class. Unfortunately, by the time the students in those
third and fifth grade classrooms get into eighth grade, they will have
learned the following lessons about learning:

the right answer matters more than thinking;

the right answer is inside the teacher’s head but not theirs;

once they are the kind of student who doesn’t get the answer, chances are they will always be that kind of student;

because
the right answer is not connected to anything the student does, then
it’s not connected to anything they’ll do in the future, so why bother?

If
we want our students to learn, we have to enable our teachers to learn.
We have to provide them with a vision of what to work toward and allow
them to approximate that vision through practice.

We have to allow them to take risks, to extend effort and to fail, if that failure can allow for reflection and self-evaluation.

If
we want our students to value learning, we have to enable our teachers
to value learning. We need to look at how administrators support teacher
learning and facilitate professional conversations.

Are
teachers urged to attend conferences and read professional books,
articles or blogs? Are they participating in lesson studies with
colleagues to work through teaching conundrums? Are they allowed to say,
“I don’t know” or “Let me try that again”?

If
we believe that schools are places where learning is taught, we have to
reestablish the role of the teacher as the one whose job it is to teach
students not just what to know but how to know.

Unfortunately,
conditions that allow for teacher learning have been replaced with
humiliation and fear in New York City schools. Teachers’ rankings have
been published in newspapers and used by administrators to threaten
dismissal or deny tenure — never mind that they are based on what is
widely considered to be a flawed statistical model.

Any
attempt to get schools to value learning will be in vain unless we
first divest teacher evaluations from test scores. Only then will
teachers be able to take the risks necessary to learn and grow.

As
they do, our students will surely learn and grow — and maybe then we
will truly be able to measure a teacher’s ability to teach.

Dorothy Barnhouse is a literacy consultant who has worked in the New York City public schools for the past two decades.

Campaign underway to promote the People’s Platform for Public
Education

National Conversation about the Platform Planks conducted prior to the
Convention using the SOS website, Twitter, Facebook, and other social
media.

Draft of each Platform Plank developed prior to the Convention through
Committees

Platform Planks discussed during the Delegate Meetings held at the
Convention and finalized for approval by the General Assembly on
Saturday, August 4th.
o Participants at the Convention will serve as Delegates.

Signing Event at the General Assembly held on Sunday morning, August
5th

Platform delivered and presented at the Republican Convention the week
of August 27th in Tampa, Florida and the Democratic Convention the week
of September 3rd at Charlotte, North Carolina.

Platform Planks used throughout the United States as “rallying points” for
needed action to strengthen public education.

Published: April 17, 2012

The classroom at Intermediate School 318 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was
filled on Tuesday with the thumping and clattering of a half-dozen
high-speed chess matches, played with a rambunctious energy more
reminiscent of a hockey game than of Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue.

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

The school’s conquering heroes — its chess players — were blowing off
steam. On Sunday, in Minneapolis, they became the first middle school
team to win the United States Chess Federation’s national high school championship.
The team, mostly eighth graders, beat out top high schools like
Stuyvesant in Manhattan and Thomas Jefferson in Alexandria, Va.

The victory burnishes what is already a legend in the chess world. At
I.S. 318, more than 60 percent of the students come from families with
incomes below the federal poverty level. Yet each stairwell landing
bristles with four-foot chess trophies, and the school celebrities are
people like James A. Black Jr. A
13-year-old with twinkly eyes and curly eyelashes, James is not a
football hero or a valedictorian, but a certified chess master who
gently corrects his teachers on the fine points of strategy.

Watching over a particularly raucous game on Tuesday, James, wearing a
black sweatsuit and a huge book bag, took notice of the moment when only
kings and pawns were left. “Automatic draw,” he declared. “Insufficient
mating material.”

I.S. 318 is a perennial powerhouse, often sweeping middle school
national championships against exclusive schools where more students can
afford private lessons. A recent graduate, Rochelle Ballantyne, has
secured a chess scholarship to the University of Texas-Dallas — though
she is still a student at Brooklyn Tech — and aims to be the first
African-American female master in chess history. Even before the big
win, Magnus Carlsen of Norway, the No. 1 ranked player in the world, was
scheduled to visit the students next week.

But the new milestone means something more, say school officials, who
express hope that it will help the program survive budget cuts that
threaten chess and other after-school and elective programs across the
city.

“The difference in mental development between a junior high school kid and a high school kid is impossible to overstate,” said Elizabeth Spiegel,
the school’s full-time chess teacher, who helped turn a small
after-school program into a national contender, the core of the school’s
identity and the focus of a recently completed documentary, “Brooklyn Castle.”

The school placed second in the high school competition in 2011. This
year, I.S. 318 and Manhattan’s elite Hunter College High School tied for
first, but I.S. 318 took home the first-place trophy because its
opponents in the tournament won more games than Hunter’s.

Remarkable as it is, the accomplishment is not as unimaginable as it
would have been 20 years ago, when players developed more slowly. But
computers and better training methods have made 13-year-old masters less
rare than they once were. Last year, a Chinatown elementary school,
Public School 124 Yung Wing, placed first at the high school tournament,
albeit in a lower-rated division.

Chess is embedded in the culture of I.S. 318. All sixth graders take
weekly chess classes and can continue chess as an elective for the next
two years. Players from acclaimed elementary school chess programs like
the one at Public School 31 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, feed the school,
but the team also welcomes beginners. Chess banners line the hallways,
and the school’s answering machine says, “Thank you for calling I.S.
318, home of the national chess champions.”

And when Ms. Spiegel, who started at I.S. 318 as a part-time chess
coach, got her own classroom a few years ago, she took down the faces of
the presidents from atop the blackboard and replaced them with a row of
chess champions like Boris Spassky.

The walls are plastered with chess tips that read like maxims for living
life: “When you don’t know what to do next, improve your worst piece”
reads one, written in felt-tip marker. “If you’re winning, play safe and
keep the game clean and simple. If you are losing, take risks and
complicate the game.”

Chess, Ms. Spiegel said, recognizes many kinds of intelligence. Some top
academic students excel, while others never take to it, she said. And
some chess geniuses might have little interest in learning the map of
Europe. She said the school viewed chess not as a competitive
pressure-cooker but as a way to learn how one’s mind works.

“You do a lot of thinking about how you think, especially about how you
make decisions,” she said. “You’ll hear a kid say, ‘I made this mistake
because I was very emotional.’ ”

Most of I.S. 318’s 1,650 students are from the Williamsburg area, said
John Galvin, an assistant principal. But some come for the chess,
including the three top players, Justus Williams, from the South Bronx;
James Black, from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn; and Isaac Barayev, from
Forest Hills, Queens.

James was 8 when his father brought home a chess set from Kmart, he
recalled: “It had little cards explaining what moves each piece could
make.”

His father, James A. Black, said he hoped chess would bring his son a
college scholarship, and that it had already shaped his life.

“The group of people that he hangs with,” Mr. Black said, “it is everything. He thinks before he acts.”

The game has brought James and his chess colleagues a popularity that sometimes tickles and sometimes unnerves them.

“A lot of kids know my name,” James said. “I say, ‘How do you know my
name?’ and they say, ‘I hear it on the loudspeaker all the time.’ ”

Maya and Mariah McGreen, twins from Bushwick who are on the team, said
that after the victory, their friends — fans, not players — told them
they must win at the girls’ national championships, on Friday in
Chicago. One told Maya, “You so owe me a trophy.”

James aims to become a grandmaster, preferably before finishing high
school. Sometimes, he said, he contemplates becoming a chess teacher:
“It’s like being a professional basketball player — you do something you
love for a living.”

The chess program is a labor of love for many supporters. Not least of
them was the longtime principal, Fortunato Rubino, who died on April 2.
Mr. Galvin, the assistant principal, said the team might present the new
trophy to his wife.

Donors have stepped in to offset school budget cuts and rising costs;
the travel budget alone is about $70,000, Mr. Galvin said. The program
gets significant support from a nonprofit organization called
Chess-in-the-Schools, which initially sent Ms. Spiegel to I.S. 318, and
numerous other sponsors.

All that has made chess a fact of life in the school — not just for the
chess elite but for beginners like Michael Grullon, 11, who said he
admired the chess team but planned to “stay in the minor leagues,” and
his opponent, Raymond Torres, 12, who taunted him: “Yo, dude, illegal
move.”

Then there are the champions, like James. “You should totally take the
G-4,” he told Ms. Spiegel as she faced off with Tommy Zhang, 13.

Ms. Spiegel, who is an expert, a level below James’s ranking of master,
could not see what he saw on the board, and could not tell if he was
helping or sabotaging. She threw up her hands and said, “I’m not sure if
James is giving bad advice on purpose, or not.”

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Let’s go back in time. It’s 1971; young Barack Obama has just moved back to his native Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn (“Toot”) and Stanley Dunham. Barack has just completed fourth grade in Indonesia and has left his mother and half-sister behind in Jakarta. “It was time for me to attend an American school” (Dreams from My Father, p.54).

Emerson said, “There is properly no history; only biography.”

Passing on the local Honolulu public school system, young Barack uses “Gramp’s” connections to cut a long wait list and enrolls in the posh Punahou Academy, a renowned “incubator for island elites.” Toot’s salary (she’s a bank vice president) and a partial scholarship keep him there through high school.

Private schooling served Mr. Obama well. He compiled a dazzling record of accomplishments … climaxing in his now famous stint as first-ever African American editor of the Harvard Law Review. People took note. The rest is history.

That’s what we gained; what we lost was the chance to elect in 2008 a president with first-hand knowledge of American public education.

Undeterred by the unfamiliar landscape, the new president charged headlong into the pitched battle then being waged against teachers and their unions by what its creators call the “education reform movement.” Ostensibly, “reform” seeks to transform American public education by introducing “accountability.”

Obama picked the “reform” side and made instant bedfellows of its leadership. Checkout a roster of “reform’s” high command: Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, Steven Brill, Davis Guggenheim: top-heavy with cash but frighteningly lacking in first-hand experience. Not a public school grad in the bunch.

The president himself is batting a thousand in this regard. Having managed to reach adulthood without ever setting foot in an American public school, he’s ensured that his own kids escape that hideous fate as well. In Chicago, Sasha and Malia ‘did’ the University of Chicago Lab School. In D.C. they are tucked away at Sidwell Friends, alongside other children of the Washington political and social elite.

The children safely removed, Obama thundered cluelessly into the public education debate. His signature “Race to the Top” initiative is the centerpiece of the Obama education agenda. RTTP “incentivizes” the states to rank schools and teachers on the basis of students’ performance on standardized tests. RTTP says “scores go up, or else.” “Else” is — complicated legalisms and edu-jargon simplified — school closings, privatization and teacher firings. This is known as “high stakes testing” and it is a Heritage Foundation’s wet dream.

The alleged goal is to improve student outcomes. But people in the trenches will tell you that not only are outcomes not improved, but the program actually exacerbates all pre-existing forms of school dysfunction and corruption: bureaucracy, excessive paperwork, stultifying regulation, classroom micromanagement, fiscal mismanagement and generalized chaos.

Add to this ugly mix a brand new viral strain: manipulation and corruption of data. The movers and shakers of the “reform movement” do not want to hear or see this, so they don’t. And why should they? Their children will not be touched by any of it. Nor will the children of anyone in their social circle. School “reform” is for them, not for us. That’s why God invented the remote control.

President Obama has lately dropped a few election year hints that he may be edging away, ever so slightly, from “reform” movement dogma and particularly from the idea of standardized test scores as panacea. Good. But he has much more to learn about public education.

He desperately needs skilled guidance and sage advice. Unfortunately Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is neither skilled nor sage when it comes to education.
A political creature of the Chicago Democratic machine, his apologists bristle at the notion that he is without relevant background. They point to his mother, owner of a private tutoring service in Chicago, as proof that Secretary Duncan has “the right stuff.” My own mom was a legal secretary in Mount Vernon, N.Y. for 25 years. I don’t expect a call from the president telling me that I’ve been nominated to the Supreme Court.

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About Me

Norm Scott worked in the NYC school system from 1967 to 2002, spending 30 of those years teaching elementary school in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn (District 14). He retired in July 2002. He has been active in education reform and in the UFT, often as a critic of union policy, since 1970, working with a variety of groups. In 1996 he began publishing Education Notes, a newsletter for teachers attending the UFT Delegate Assembly. In 2002, he expanded the paper into a 16-page tabloid, printing up to 25,000 copies distributed to teacher mailboxes through Ed Notes supporters. Education Notes started publishing a blog in Aug. 2006. Norm also writes the School Scope education column for The Wave, the Rockaway Beach community newspaper.